Scourge of War Gettysburg on iPad?

[JeanAllTrekkie]

So Matrix Games, Shenandoah Studios, Paradox Interactive (HOI, Vicky) etc and tons of other developers are porting their games to The iPad.

Any chance we could see SOW Gettysburg for iPad in the future? I'm sure with low or minimal unit/environment animations Mobile devices can handle the game. If they could get Grand Theft Auto 3 Vice City to work on iPad I'm sure we can get SOW to. What do u guys think? I'd buy it even for $30.00

[Little Powell]

It has been discussed. It would be a completely new gaming engine of course with many design changes. iPad and other tablets are very popular right now for games and are quite possibly the future of gaming.

[JeanAllTrekkie]

I can guarantee you if you do you got my $$.

It will be very popular! I can see you guys in the App Store's - Top 10 Paid Apps. 1 week there you can then take a vacation for a year and rack in the $$$$$$.

[Flanyboy]

It has been discussed. It would be a completely new gaming engine of course with many design changes. iPad and other tablets are very popular right now for games and are quite possibly the future of gaming.

Right. One thing to keep in mind though is that most games that are getting full ports are far less resource intensive than you'd think. Grand Theft Auto Vice City ran on the PS2 which had a single 299 mhz cpu and only 32 MB of RAM.

[kaschykb]

I can't begin to imagine how this game could be played or ported to an iPad. Most of the time the iOS versions of "regular" games are just an imitation of the true game. That being said, I'm sure a ACW game designed by the SOW brains and using the SOW name would be highly entertaining. I'm picturing a tactical game using the same graphics as the "replay" battle maps.

[Flanyboy]

I can't begin to imagine how this game could be played or ported to an iPad. Most of the time the iOS versions of "regular" games are just an imitation of the true game. That being said, I'm sure a ACW game designed by the SOW brains and using the SOW name would be highly entertaining. I'm picturing a tactical game using the same graphics as the "replay" battle maps.

Martix/Slitherine Games is one of the few publishers that legitimately has ported full fledged PC games over to iPad but for the most part they are very old games, from the mid to early 2000s, there will be a few exceptions later this year like Panzer Corps and Space Program Manager so it will be interesting to see how those games do but even so they are far less resource intensive than SOW is.

[opuslife]

My apologies for a luddite comment, but I don't understand why it wouldn't already run on most tablet type machines - as they all now seem to be pretty robust in terms of processing power, no? (Please don't flame me for a dumb question)

I realize that they're probably not up to the level of a 'gaming' machine, but do they really need to be to run SOW?

I've been using a fairly basic laptop to play SOW all along - nothing fancy. 4GB of RAM, I think. Or maybe 8GB. Not sure, but no fancy graphics cards or accelerators, probably much less than what's in a standard loss-leader cheap desktop - and it plays fine.

Curious, is this not the norm?

Bob W
Bristol RI

[Flanyboy]

I'm not a programmer so I can't give you a complete reason but there are a few.

1. I'm not aware of any tablets that have more than 2 GB of RAM, I believe the newest iPad has just 1 GB. That's 1/2 or less RAM than the basic laptop you have and on the very low end of PC specs. My old Toshiba which is 9 years old now doesn't run SOW and barely runs TCM2 with just 1.5 GB of RAM so it's obviously on the borderline.

2. While most tablets are multi core they don't run at 100% of the clock speed their specs state. That's because of a few things. Cooling is a huge issue. Your PC can run it's CPU at 100% of the clock speed and it's cooling system can dissipate the heat generated by the CPU to be reliable and run at full power for an extended period of time, Tablets have no real cooling fans and are not able to run hot or run at 100% for any length of time. This means most Tablets while clocked near what many CPUs offer simply cannot run at their stated speeds. If they do they will overheat. You see more and more multi core tablets but they really only run at a fraction of their stated clock speeds and are thus dramatically under powered compared to an equivalent PC due to heating issues as well as the fact that they need to be able to run on a much smaller battery than even a basic laptop has, so battery life also causes them to be intentionally slowed down to conserve on battery life.

Also the integrated graphics chips from my understanding on tablets is not yet on par with integrated chips on laptops and again heating and battery consumption are key restrictions on these devices.

As I said I'm not a programmer so I can't say for sure if these things are a total bar to bigger games on tablets but given my understanding of the above issues it makes tablets far behind what you'd think given their technical specifications vs their actual capabilities. We'll definitely get tablets on par with laptops at some point but we're not there yet and we're still several years away.